They were silent, only bending on her their bright curious eyes.
They saw that she was unspeakably wretched; that some great woe or shock had recently fallen on her, and given her glance that startled horror and blanched her rich skin to an ashen pallor, and frozen, as it were, the very current of the young blood in her veins.
They were silent a little space. Then whispered together.
"Come with us," they urged. "We, too, go to Paris. We are poor. We follow art. We will befriend you."
She was deaf to them long, being timid and wild of every human thing. But they were urgent; they were eloquent; these young girls with their bright eyes; these men who spoke of art; these wanderers who went to the great city.
In the end they pressed on her their companionship. They, too, were going to Paris; they spoke of perils she would run, of vouchers she would need: she wondered at their charity, but in the end walked on with them—fearing the Red Mouse.
They were mirthful, gentle people, so she thought: they said they followed art; they told her she could never enter Paris nameless and alone: so she went. The chief of the little troop watched wonderingly her step, her posture, her barbaric and lustrous beauty, brilliant still even through the pallor of grief and the weariness of fatigue; of these he had never seen the like before, and he knew their almost priceless value in the world, and of the working classes and street mobs of Paris.
"Listen," he said suddenly to her. "We shall play to-night at the next town. Will you take a part?"
Walking along through the glades of the wood, lost in thought, she started at his voice.
"I do not know what you mean?"